Interview: Cammie Dunaway

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NOA's EVP of sales and marketing chats with us about the publisher's E3 showing.

By Matt Casamassina

It's no secret that traditional game-players were not especially happy with Nintendo's lackluster E3 2008 Media Briefing, an hour-plus event that rarely touched upon the games for the hardcore segment. Following the conference, we sat down with NOA's executive vice president of sales and marketing, Cammie Dunaway, and chatted about the show. Here's what she had to say:

Cammie: Dunaway: What we tried to show was a breadth of games because what we're all about is having games that appeal to everyone People of all ages, both sexes. People of all experience levels, from the most sophisticated gamer who could really respond to something like Call of Duty or Star Wars, to brand new gamers who might immediately jump into something like Wii Music. That was our goal -- to get a little something for everyone.

IGN: Why didn't Nintendo show off more hardcore titles like MadWorld, Fatal Frame and The Conduit?

Cammie Dunaway: Well, we have to pick and choose what we're going to do at E3 and a couple of the games that we didn't show which we've already announced I think will be appealing to hardcore gamers. Wario is going to be a ton of fun and we just announced that a few weeks ago. And then Kirby, which has nostalgia to it. And as Mr. Iwata indicated, we're always working on Mario and Zelda titles, but E3 2008 wasn't the show to show them.

IGN: E3 has in the past oftentimes become a battleground for publishers -- essentially: who can produce the biggest show? Do you feel that is still the way for Nintendo to approach the event?

Cammie Dunaway: For us, we just think about how do we continue to surprise and delight people and how do we continue to show that there are more and more ways for people to enjoy gaming. One of the things that we're excited about is all of the peripherals. Showing a peripheral like Wii Fit and the Balance Board that was launched last year, but now showing it with Shaun White and a snowboarding game that was developed from the ground up for Wii. You start thinking about new peripherals like the Wii MotionPlus and thinking about all the possibilities both for Nintendo and third-parties, and that story of enhanced experiences is one of the main things that we really wanted to bring out.

IGN: Nintendo has already announced it won't be at the Leipzig Games Show. What about another Space World or maybe the Tokyo Game Show?

Cammie Dunaway: We just take each show as it comes and make a call on whether or not we feel like we've got something newsworthy and interesting to showcase.

IGN: We really like MotionPlus. Is this a technology that you would like to make the standard? In other words, would future Wii remotes simply feature the tech internally or would the attachment ship with all systems and controllers sold?

Cammie Dunaway: What we announced was that we will ship it as a free accessory packaged with Wii Sports Resort and that we'll also sell it as a separate accessory, and I think what you'll continue to see is both us and others develop new games for it. But that's as far out in the future as we're going right now.

IGN: Why sell WiiSpeak separately from Animal Crossing?

Cammie Dunaway: Because the Animal Crossing game can be a blast in and of itself. The chance to really customize your experience. The chance to go and look at your friends' towns and share that experience with them. You don't have to have WiiSpeak in order for it to be a great experience, but when you add WiiSpeak on top of it, I think it enhances it, and that'll be a level of gameplay that'll be appealing to some audiences.

IGN: And do you foresee third-parties using it?

Cammie Dunaway: I would certainly anticipate that it's one more tool in a developer's toolkit.

IGN: As everyone knows, Wii is out of storage space. We had hoped Nintendo might solve this issue at E3, but it didn't. Any reason why not?

Cammie Dunaway: Well, we just don't have any announcements to make right now on storage, but what I see in my own family is that we buy a heck of a lot of Virtual Console games and WiiWare games. We always want to play what's new and so the way we're handling is we just delete the games we're not playing right now knowing that they're there if we ever want to go back to them, and just focus on the new gameplay.

IGN: Seems like a workaround to us. It's just not very convenient. Is that something Nintendo is aware of?

Cammie Dunaway: We're certainly aware of it. I just don't have any announcements to make right now.

IGN: iPhone is flying off store shelves. Does Nintendo view Apple as a competitor these days?

Cammie Dunaway: I think Apple is a company that we respect tremendously, but we're really excited about how people are using DS, and the fact that we have over 20 million in our installed base and that our sales volume is up 12 percent over a year ago. It suggests that there's a whole lot of momentum still to be had in the DS business.

IGN: Any chance we'll see different colored Wii consoles in the near future?

Cammie Dunaway: Certainly don't have any announcements to make about different colors. We continue to sell out of Wii pretty much as fast as we put it on the shelf. We've increased capacity 30 percent so it's nice to be able to get more units to more people. We're shipping 2.4 million monthly worldwide and it varies a bit from country to country, but when you've got something that's still selling out about as fast as we can put it into the market, we're not thinking about further colors at this point.

IGN: Yeah, we didn't think so, but we had to ask. What about a DS redesign?

Cammie Dunaway: What we're focused on right now for DS is just getting it into the hands of more people. Again, when a piece of hardware that's been out as long as DS has been out is able to still grow in the double digits, it just suggests that there's still a lot of untapped market demand, particularly among new audiences, be it different ages or women taking up DS more readily.